Negotiations haven’t started yet on TAFTA, the proposed EU-US Transatlantic trade agreement, which President Obama announced as a major part of his second term agenda in his inaugural. But before the talks even begin the French are demanding that any agreement exclude their highly-subsidized cultural and entertainment sectors. The French have been warning for some […]

Google is the new GE and Amazon is the new Sears Roebuck. So argues John Gapper in a very smart FT piece on the fortunes and future of Google. Just as GE dominated its rivals in the battle to control and profit from electricity, Google is leading the way with innovations in data gathering and artificial intelligence: […]

A proposal to change the nation’s higher ed accreditation system, backed by former Nebraska Governor and Senator Bob Kerrey and Ben Nelson, the founder of an online university with “ivy league ambitions”, is reportedly “circulating quietly on Capitol Hill.” Inside Higher Ed reports: The measure would direct accreditors “to develop an expedited process by which new and innovative […]

“Syria’s uprising offered the possibility of a strategic defeat of Iran,” writes Vali Nasr in Bloomberg. But instead, the opposite is happening: “events in Syria are spinning in Iran’s favor. Assad’s regime is winning ground, the war has made Iran more comfortable in its nuclear pursuits, and Iran’s gains have embarrassed U.S. allies that support the Syrian […]

Yesterday, the Syrian civil war reached the Israeli-Syrian buffer zone in the Golan Heights, with rebels briefly capturing a UN-controlled border crossing before being driven away by Syrian army tanks. All is quiet again today, but the Israeli military remains on high alert.That little bit of excitement was apparently far too much for Austria’s blue […]

The Illinois pension saga just keeps getting worse. In response to the state legislature’s failure to pass a pension reform bill before adjourning, Fitch downgraded Illinois’s bonds from A to A- earlier this week. On Thursday Moody’s joined the party, lowering the state’s rating from A2 to A3. S&P is now the only agency not […]

In 1971, as Henry Kissinger feigned illness in Pakistan to avoid public scrutiny of his top secret trip to China, the most momentous act of diplomacy in years, officials in China were fretting about his plane. Kissinger would be arriving in a Boeing 707, a model of plane that did not normally fly to China. […]

President Obama is in California today, and he’s touting the state’s implementation of Obamacare as a key piece of evidence that the ACA will work nationwide. Wonkblog: With the focus in recent months on the law’s shaky rollout and continuing political battles, the president wants to draw attention to a state that has embraced the […]

In an escalating fight between China and the EU over everything from wine to solar panels, Beijing has resorted to talking tough in public: state-run newspapers have published angry editorials exhorting Europeans to recognize their decline and threatening strong action if Brussels doesn’t back down. The Financial Times has the story: “The change of the times and the […]

A deal was struck this week that should allow Jefferson County, the most populous county in Alabama, to exit bankruptcy by year’s end as the largest municipal failure in US history. The WSJ reports: The county’s biggest creditor, J.P. Morgan Chase, will shoulder a loss of about $840 million as part of the agreement between […]